Evaluating Pastoral Effectiveness: To Measure or Not to Measure

Interviews were conducted with 101 senior pastoral leaders from a variety of denominations in order to identify the ways in which pastors and those in authority positions over senior pastoral leaders measure their own effectiveness. The findings of these interviews revealed 23 measures of effectiveness in five categories, including leader outcomes, congregational outcomes, and objective outcomes. Based on the effectiveness taxonomy described in the current study, a process is suggested for a preliminary discussion among church leadership teams, congregational boards, and denominations to identify their primary mission, constituencies served, and related effectiveness priorities.     

To Act or Not to Act: Nonconsequentialism in Environmental Decision-Making

Research on environmental-decision making is usually based on utilitarian models, which imply that people's decisions are only influenced by the outcomes. This research provides evidence for values and moral positions that reflect nonconsequentialist rather than consequentialist views. In doing this, this article refers to “sacred values,” which are values that are seen as not-substitutable and nontradable. Two studies were designed to examine evidence for sacred values and their role on act versus omission choices within the environmental domain. The studies revealed that sacred values were closely associated with preferences for actions, trade-off reluctance, deontological focus, and position of moral universalism. The results suggest that it is important to account for sacred values and nonconsequentialist views in environmental decision-making research.     

To Serve or Not to Serve: Ethical and Policy Implications

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) is one of the nation's more influential health‐related non‐profit organizations. It plays a large role in shaping health policy by commissioning panels to develop “white papers” describing research and recommendations on a variety of health topics. These white paper publications are often used to help make policy decisions at the legislative and executive levels. Such a prominent institution might seem like a natural ally for policy‐related collaborative efforts. As community psychologists, we strongly endorse efforts to positively influence public policy at the national level. However, while serving on influential panels and commissions like the IOM might seem to be very much part of the ethos of our discipline, there are occasions when such institutions are pursuing a mission that inadvertently has the potential to instigate divisive friction among community activists and organizations. A case study is presented whereby I describe my decision not to accept an invitation to serve on a controversial IOM panel. I explore the ethical challenges regarding maintaining my independence from this institution and its attempt to redefine chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), as well as the process of searching for alternative avenues for collaborating with community activists to influence policy related to these debilitating illnesses.     

To See or Not to See: Blinded by Guilt: Reply to Commentary

In response to Annabella Bushra's discussion and her focus on what is missing in the clinical material, the author speculates about the repetition of the historical trauma of purifying mixed race in the face of its complexity—trying to neatly package race despite it not so neatly fitting into any one category—and losing the individual by overly focusing on skin color. The author considers the silence, secrecy, and transgression in the treatment and, in this context, a few of Bushra's key points are addressed—sorting out the nature of hate in relation to Susan, passing as transgression, and White guilt. A distinction is made between a malevolent, destructive hate and a loving hate, and White guilt is considered as a defense against recognition of the other.     

To Tell or Not to Tell: Disclosure and the Narrative Self

ABSTRACT Drawing from a narrative identity framework, we present the results of three studies examining the nature of what people do and do not disclose about their life experiences. Across three studies, our findings indicate that (1) the major difference in what people do and do not disclose concerns the emotionality of the events and whether or not the events are transgressions; (2) for everyday memorable events, increased negative emotion is associated with greater likelihood of disclosure; but (3) for more important and/or longer retained events, increased negative and decreased positive emotion were associated with lower likelihoods of disclosure. We also found that socioemotional consequences are an important reason for nondisclosure of important past experiences and are predictably related to the extent to which events induce positive and negative emotions. Findings are considered in terms of their implications for narrative identity.     

Pragmatic Schemas and the Selection Task: To Reason or Not to Reason

Cheng and Holyoak (1985) have proposed that people possess classes of linguistically based schemas that have an internal structure that is determined by pragmatic considerations. They found that when permission schemas (“If you want to do P, then you must do Q”) are used in the selection task, the success rate is much superior to what is usually observed. According to Cheng and Holyoak, this is due to the fact that the permission schema is defined by a set of production rules that give the same answers to problems of conditional inference as those of formal logic. In order to test this hypothesis specifically, 160 university students were given one of two tests. The first contained two sets of inferential reasoning tasks, one using a permission schema, the second using a relation of multiple causality. The second test employed the same two conditional relations, but in an appropriate context. The results indicated that subjects did better on the reasoning task with the schema of multiple causality when presented in context, but, as predicted, their performance was much worse on the inferential reasoning task with the permission schema, which generated a higher proportion of logically incorrect responses. These results suggest that contrary to what has been affirmed, permission schemas might not have a logical structure that is equivalent to conditional logic. A second experiment examined selection task performance using the same two relations in context. Performance on the permission schema was superior to that found with the relation of multiple causality. This confirmed previous results indicating that permission schemas do improve selection task performance, but also suggests that this effect is not related to understanding of conditional reasoning.     

To Cross or Not to Cross: The Effect of Locomotion on Street-Crossing Behavior

Perception of some affordances requires action scaling rather than simply body (size) scaling. Crossing a road safely is such an affordance. Perceiving accurately whether crossing in front of oncoming traffic is possible entails perceiving the relation between environmental properties (the to-be-crossed distance and the available time) and one's walking abilities. Only while walking is perceptual information about walking abilities available; hence, a more accurate perception of whether crossing is possible is expected than when stationary. We observed crossing behavior (stopping, staying, and crossing) at a crosswalk and related this behavior to the time that was available before the next vehicle arrived. The critical time gap that separated not crossing (stopping or staying) and crossing was smaller, that is, closer to the actual crossing time, when walking than when standing still. Thus, crossing from standstill entailed a larger safety margin. This suggests that information about ongoing action can yield more accurate perception of the affordance in question.     

To Belong or Not to Belong. Affective Self-Nationalization in Thailand

Through analyzing conflict narratives regarding Khao Phra Wihan, a territorial conflict important for nationalists in Thailand, this article aims to detangle how nationalization is experienced and performed on an individual level. In this article, the concept “affective self-nationalization” is proposed to analyze the emotional and embodied practices through which individuals fashion themselves into nationalized subjects. In Thailand, self-nationalization is instigated by the governing agency through repeated, regular, mandatory, public performances of loyalty through which individuals create the nation collectively. These performances create automatic feelings to the nation, establishes national others as fearsome, and rule through the basic human need of belonging. At the same time, individuals’ emotions shape the society through how they decide to perform nationalization. The concept of “affective self-nationalization” captures the connections between the official nationalizing program of “outside” society in a form of nationalist emotional socialization with individual experience of nationalizing.